Fix Your 9 Crimes
by Purpleperson13
Summary: A million fragments of déjà vu passed his vision, all the times he'd watched silhouettes caught in the back door lights of some shitty red light district bar/brothel/speakeasy/den because he'd had too much or said too much or done too much. He was too drunk to care and never ever drunk *enough*, never ever as far away from him as he wanted to be. Spirk


**A bit of something I've been working on for a while. This is me theowing those wwaiting for the next chapter of His Master a bone. I'm sorry, it's in progress but I've been busy lately with exams coming so you'll have to excuse me. **

**Thank you for taking an interest. **

**Disclaimer; I do not own any part of the Star Trek franchise or it's characters. **

His head cracked left and he was stumbling into a table, the snap of wood on bone resounded (that rib was broken for sure), but, of course, he was drunk off his ass, he didn't feel a thing. He felt it when some asshat grabbed his jacket, though, felt it when they tried to drag him out and definitely felt it when he broke his knuckles across a nose that was made entirely of some semblance of bone and not at all of human. Shit he felt that. So much that he hardly noticed he was being bounced before he was chucked like a rag doll into the rough stone alley behind the bar. When he stopped skidding and scrapping and smacking his head off the back wall of the next establisfhment over (a brothel, he knew) he'd just enough consciousness left to stare at the dark patch in the blinding rectangle of doorway before it slammed shut in his face.

A million fragments of déjà vu passed his vision, all the times he'd watched silhouettes caught in the back door lights of some shitty red light district bar/brothel/speakeasy/den because he'd had too much or said too much or done too much. He was too drunk to care and never ever drunk *enough*, never ever as far away from him as he wanted to be.

Bloodied hair found filthy bricks - right on that part that would be the size of a grapefruit in a few hours - and his head tilted just enough that he could see the sky. Stars burst across his vision that had nothing to do with being punched in the face by a fist that felt like stone and slowly twinkled out as he lost consciousness. As his awareness slipped away, the throbbing did too.

Maybe Jim wouldn't wake up tomorrow?

He hoped so.

"Ah! An omega!" The school nurse proclaimed, turning the sheet towards Jim so that he could see the results of his blood test for himself. He gasped. An omega? The nurse misinterpreted his expression, she thought, appropriately.

"Well, you know, we can't all be alpha. We have to deal with the hand we're dealt and -"

"No!" She stared and Jim blushed at his interruption, losing his fire but determined to continue, "I mean, like, no I don't want to be an alpha. Not that I'm saying I wouldn't want to be one if I was one it's just - ah shit - oh! Sorry, excuse me. I just - ah - mean I'm happy tha's all."

He was staring intently into his lap by now.

Then she gave him one of those warm, motherly smiles that he was sure she saved only for him when he'd fallen and scraped his knee or needed some confidence or had said something to make her proud.

He had a feeling it was the third one.

When he walked out of the nurse's office soon after, it was with a little smile of wonder on his face and a hand, protectively, subconsciously, rested on his lower stomach.

Jim woke with a familiar feeling of all over grossness which hit him but a nanosecond before his stomach pitched like a nosediving falcon and he turned over to projectile vomit bile and shitty whiskey over the alley beside him. He got some on his jeans. He didn't care. Couldn't care about much of anything over the roaring in his ears and the other familiar kind of headache and the newly formed bruises and the lump on the back of his head that was scraped up to shit by the cheap brickwork behind him.

He didn't remember anything but that was nothing new. If he were to go by past experiences he'd probably gotten drunk, gotten into a fight then gotten kicked out on his ass. Yup. That sounded about right.

And, usually, if he stayed around long enough for the kicker-outer to come back he got another lump in the head for free. He didn't feel like waiting around to collect, so he picked himself up and limped away.

Broken rib. He would be lying if he said he wasn't a bit curious how he got that.

"Dammit, Jim, how the hell did you get yourself looking like that? No, no , wait, let me guess; bar fight, right?"

Jim just nodded and sat down in the sagging chair in the examination room. He didn't have insurance, but Bones had been patching him up for years without accepting payment. They were friends, after all.

"What did you do this time?" The doctor rumbled angrily as he turned to find gauze and tape and painkillers,"Sleep with a girl and then meet her wrestler boyfriend? Take the piss out of a tiny off planeter who turned out to be 5 times stronger than you? Just trip? What was it? Tell me Jim cos I'm getting pretty shit sick of you turnin' up like this every other day hungover and beaten to a pulp. Don't even tell me you're not cos you are, I can tell, I swear-"

"Bones!" Jim wasn't nearly so worried about interrupting now,"shaddup a minute. I'm hungover, remember? Jeezus." The doctor turned to pin him in his steely grey gaze.

"Fine. I won't patch you up. I'll send you out to rot in the streets like someone who wasn't your best friend would do."

Jim's bursting head found his hands and he sighed, the movement causing fragments of his broken rib to rub agonisingly along his side.

"Sorry. I'm sorry. You're right, that was out of line. But I'm gonna tell you what I tell you every time, because it's true. I don't remember. What I do remember is that I walked into some bar, ordered a whiskey and woke up in an alley with a headache and a broken rib." The doctor's eyebrows flew up and his grumpy-but-worried scowl turned into an angry-but-deeply-concerned frown.

"Broken rib? Dammit Jim you should have said when you came in, let me see." And before he'd a chance to protests he was being gently but firmly pressed onto his back (the chair reclined), shirt lifted to reveal a bouquet of black and purple bruises blooming along his left side. Blues and purples and greens and yellows faded in and out along the patches of visible skin, deep and shallow, old and new and pock-marked and striped with scars of anf from various fights, boughts of self hate and torturous methods. And Bones knew they were only the tip of the iceberg when it came to Jim's self-damaging nature.

He swore, brought his latex covered hands to press methodically along the worst parts of the injury, the burst and swelling, ugly skin and causing Jim a deep wince as pain danced along his side and through his chest.

When he was done there he removed Jim's shirt completely and felt around his bruised arms, up the back of his neck and to his head with gentle fingers, finding the bloody lump where he'd hit it with a scowl. He moved on, checking pulse, pupil dilation and feeling for any more injuries. He took blood, as usual. Jim's many conquests meant a need to constantly monitor for STIs and the like. Bones never checked if he was pregnant. Never had to.

He was called Alan and he was really sweet, taller than Jim by an inch or so with soft brown eyes and shaggy, ash - nearly white - blonde hair and these really cute dimples in his cheeks. Beta. He was a transfer student at Jim's school, paired with him in science simply because everyone else had a partner. He was Jim's first boyfriend and they were in his room alone for the first time.

They hadn't been going out long, about a fortnight, but they really liked each other, and Jim had this feeling - a kind of spark in his abdomen - that told him it could be something really special.

Back then Jim had hope, had life, every baby he saw made him shiver with joyous anticipation, back then his head didnt throban his hands didn't shake and he didn't know.

They sat on huge pillows they'd pilfered from the couch watching a cute black and white film about these four guys on a boat. One of them didn't talk and one of them had really bad facial hair and it was funny but neither was paying any real attention. They were tuned entirely to each other. So close. Nearly touching.

Then Alan laid his clammy palm over the top of Jim's clenched fist and his chest went tight, his cheeks flamed, he nearly stopped breathing. By the time he has actually calmed down the credits had started to roll. Alan hadn't tried anything else. Jim had really wanted him to.

"Hey," Jim jumped, so lost in his thoughts he hadn't noticed he was being spoken to, he blushed again,"want to watch another?" He nodded eagerly and watched as his b- Alan crawled to the TV to change the disc.

More black and white, more funny men. Only now they were in a school. Alan came back over, still on all fours, stopping not at his cushion but right in front of Jim. So close. They were sharing breath. Jim went scarlet.

"Hey do you want me to- uh, to get... Some," he swallowed loudly, because he'd noticed too; how close they were. And he didn't know what to do either. But he seemed to have some idea, because he moved, just a tiny bit, and Jim's eyelids fluttered and he moved some more and the spark was back - like a strike of liquid lightning in his belly - and he kept pressing gently forwards until he could kneel right in front of Jim and press their lips together.

It was soft. He was soft. His hands found Jim's shoulders and just kept him there, with the dry warmth of petal pressure there against his mouth.

The lightning got hotter, tighter and they opened their mouths and drew each other deeper.

It turned out to be two ribs, and they were fractured, not broken, but he'd been close enough to call it a successful self-diagnosis. His skull had suffered quite the crack, apparently, and he'd been slightly concussed but sleep and saved him from anything major. Bones said that other than a few good bruises and slight dehydration he was in annoyingly good health for a professional binge drinker, bar warrior and slut. No STIs. His liver wasn't even mildly annoyed at his approach to health.

Life was good. Kind of.

"James." And that was when Jim sighed and his better-than-usual mood vanished. 'James' was his full name. James Tiberius Kirk. And if Leonard McCoy was trying to talk to James there was a lecture at the ready.

"What?" He groaned. Jim hated hypos as a rule, but four or five consecutive jags with those damn glass needles by a malicious, underpaid doctor was just plain not on. As such his now not-great mood was made a tad worse.

It hadn't hurt the first time.

Nope.

'Hurt' could not even be considered a vaguely apt adjective to describe the sould wrenching *agony* that tore at Jim's every nerve during his first heat.

He was older now. Sixteen, the age of sexual maturity and presentation of your second gender to your peers in the form of the excretion of pheromones. It was also the age at which the majority of alphas and omegas gained a mate.

Pheromonal scent markers were left in their wake of wherever they went in the run up to the omega's first heat, and when the partner smelled the scent marker of their intended they were drawn to them by the trail of markers they left behind. In such a way were strong and compatible pairings were fromed.

Alan was long gone by now, his nomadic parents - restless after a whole year of steadfastly staying put for the sake of their son's education - had eventually gone stir crazy and moved on, abruptly ending their relationship, and opening a little hole somewhere inside Jim with his first boyfriend's absence he wasn't sure ever fully closed.

It had started as any other first heat was meant to; the noticeable dropping of scent markers, muscular ache, increase in apetite and small hormonal imbalance, a slight and unusual headache but nothing anyone thought more of than to tell Jim to take some tylenol or maybe a nap.

The tradition went that alpha came to omega for a first mating (due to the fact that they - as the 'stronger' sex - were more likely to get to their intended undeterred) thus Jim 'nested', provided by his mother with blankets and pillows and supplies of food and water as she and his brother went to grammaw's for the week. Jim's father wasn't around anymore, but Jim had never met him and it didn't bother him as such. Though he was made slightly uncomfortable when he was consoled to by other people he knew and cared not about in relation to his late father.

Jim sat in a fluffy bathrobe on the first day of his heat, nauseas and tripping with tummy butterflies and a sense of impending fate, and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And, for all that time, nothing.

And when the mucus plug evacuated, and the slick rushed, and the emptiness gaped and the cramps - the bone crushing, hiddeous, unnatural cramps - jarred even the tiniest of thoughts of fate or love or health or anything except '*want to die, please, let me die*', and the headache cleaved open to raw, open-ended fragments of white-hot, throbbing torture; he endured it alone.

And Winona Kirk, who had endured so much on his behalf over the years - came back with a new boyfriend and a new outlook on life to find her son half-dead and screaming out his soul for the abject agony and the absent fated one.

And somewhere, on the other side of the sky, a green blooded boy shrieked as a harpooned sehlat with the searing desolation of a bond opened with no recievable end.

Bones lectured Jim, then bought him a burger.

Not because he thought it was a particularly good idea to reward his behavior with food, but because he was his friend - and friends weren't supposed to be thinking about whether keeping their friends alive by means of MacDonalds for lack of being able to force feed them anything else was worth it or not.

And Jim sat, shoulders hunched protectively over himself, as always, and grazed on it, cerulean eyes flashing dolefully about the room in both search and avoidance of alphas.

Bones grumbled to himself about stupid situations and good people. After this they were going to his appartment, dammit, where he would hypo Jim into a good day's sleep and subsequently mend his wounds properly and sort out his life.

Bones sighed. His hiddeous fast food equivalent of fried chicken a lost cause on his tongue compared to the recipes of his own mother. Hell, his ex wife cooked better than this, but he - with practised ease - pushed that particukar train of thought under his mental crusher and watched on, satisfiedly, with his mind's eye as the resulting cube of mutilated thought rolled squarely from the appropriate end.

When he looked up, after realising that he had looked down at all, Jim was gone. The only trace of his existance was a crumpled dollar bill and a napkin with the words '*sorry Bones*' scrawled shinily onto its perforated surface.

Bones sighed again.

He woke up in hospital for the first time ever.

Heart and brain monitors droned and beeped and buzzed incessantly to the precise beat of the throbbing in his head and the sickly rollin of his stomach.

For a moment he thought the entire ordeal of his heat had been brought on by an accident he couldn't remember right then or if it was a result or pre-heat cramps while he slept off whatever had happened to him to land him there.

It was neither of those things.

Jim lay silently, willing whatever medication he was sure was being pumped through him in one of the icky, itchy IVs trailing from his arm to hurry up and father-trucking *work*, because his head was in agony.

Blood burst hard against his templed and he whimpered and rolled as much as his screaming abdomen would allow to bury in face his the beautiful, relieving dark and cool his pillow provided.

After what felt like days frozen in pain-disaltering stillness, a nurse - beta by his scent - cleared his throat softly by way of drawing Jim's attention. He lifted his head, which felt a million times heavier with the weight of it's throbbing, and looked at his with slitted, pain filled and desperately light omitting eyes. He could only imagine what he looked like.

"Your doctor." he said, carefully, slowly, as if this very information would cause Jim to burst out in hysterical tears. He cleared his throat again. Jim had a bad feeling. "Will be in to see you momentarily."

He nodded, stiffly, shoulders tight, and ran - in a way that still managed to constitute walking - from the room.

When, an ecstatic eternity of pain later, the nurse - Jim could squint with enough clarity to see 'M'Benga' printed in a neat, typewriter-esqe font on his nametag - returned, a soft woman in a labcoat, (the nametag pronouced her name to be 'Dr. Chapel') holding a clipboard, her warm eyes tight with the strain of news Jim was suddenly very was not good.

He had the strange urge to bolt, but was aware enough of his own condition to know he would collapse within feet. Still, adrenaline buzzed in his veins and panic surged slowly, like a lazy tidal wave, behind his eyes and in the tightening of his pulled and aching muscles.

"Mr. Kirk." She said in a reassuring tone that made him want to throw up. "We have some - ahem - unfortunate news."

And when she sat heavily in the chair by his bed, which was strangely absent of concerned family members, and next opened her mouth, Jim's entire world fell out of the bottom of his stomach.

Night heaved itself up from the depths of the snailing hours so damned slowly Jim nearly felt like sitting himself down and peeling off every inch of his own skin just to pass the time.

Time should be less excruciating to someone so supposedly optimistic, he thought. Time should be his blessing whilst he was so young; instead it was a constant reminder of his curse.

Every second a beat. And he could feel it, pulsing, rushing, aching in the deepest recesses of his mind where no amount of pain or pleasure or dophaminic, alcoholic self abuse could drag it out and crush it.

Nowadays there was no universe in which Jim could imagine his existence without this throb, this hideous secondary bulging behind his temples that reminded him in the worst possible way that he was still alive.

Why was he still alive?

Had he not tried everything? Had he not tried sex, drugs, fights, poison?

Who the hell had sat themselves down on their throne of schadenfreude and decided that he was the perfect candidate to pour tragedy on for their own enjoyment and now even give him the pleasure of dying on his own terms when he'd had enough?

To be honest he didn't care. He didn't care about much anymore.

He just wanted the whole world to stop so he could get off.

To say that Jim had taken the news with a pinch of salt, as the doctor had put it, was probably the most heinously understated mincing of the boy's rutheless tragedy M'Benga thought he had every heard.

The roaring silence was broken earlier that day, and the doctor revealed in hushed and pseudo-sympathetic tones – as she did with all her patients for lack of enough strength to become invested in their miseries without, herself, breaking down – what was probably result of a birth defect most likely to have been caused by his mother's severe distress over the death of his father.

James Tiberius Kirk had been born with an irregular reproductive system, his internal cervical passage and womb were mangled as a result of stress hormones interfering with his growth in the womb and, though he could secrete hormones regularly and effectively, did not possess the scent glands in his neck capable of bonding him to an alpha.

He was infertile and unmatable.

Broken.

Alone.

Defeated.

And Jim was so deeply beside himself that, for all of his crying and breaking and screaming for them to "*FIX ME, DON'T MAKE ME LIVE LIKE THIS, PLEASE, FIX ME, PLEASE, I CAN'T LIVE LIKE THIS*", it was all they could do to sedate him, rather than putting him completely out of his misery.

When he was walked, by his mother, out into the sun later that day, the fight having completely abated him, his shoulders pliant as he barely blinked in the diamond brightness of the Iowa summer sun, some cruellest bastardisation of fate had the gall to send a smiling cherub strolling with his omega father down the sidewalk in an angelic white pram directly before the lifeless husk of boy. And Jim Kirk broke down again in a mess of impossible dreams.

M'Benga was convinced he would have appreciated their kindness, had they ended him then.

He found a new place - just on the edge of town and not ten minutes from what used to be his apartment - and started drinking in record time. The incessant pounding in his head was a mere bottle of Jack Daniels from being shut out. He settled onto a barstool - his new permanent home - and sighed into the highball tumbler of "amber joy juice" as Bones' dead grandmother apparently called it.

He shuddered and threw any and all thoughts of his friend into a dark corner in his head wher drunk Jim wouldn't find it.

He drained his glass with a fist to his chest yo ease the burn and the guilt and ordered another with a wave.

Tonight, he decided - with the wave of near opressive relaxation that tingled in his shoulder after his third whiskey, that throbbing slipped a little further - that he wasn't James, he wasn't Jim, he wasn't anybody. Tonight he was an entity of mindless drinking and numbness. Not a thought in his desperate, screaming mind. Just the haze and the quiet.

And to get to that blessed area of silence, he was going to be a real slut.

Jim cashed every financial decision he ever made to his credit card, he never looked at his bank balance, the looming pressure of the ATM's stare too heavy for him to be able to face the hideous deficit he had no doubt acquired. Especially now that he had no form of income.

He always *had* to find a new place because he was never sure how many of the old ones he had been barred from. And it never hurt to check if the other man's whiskey was, in fact, cheaper (though, he deliberately neglected to remind himself, it was very difficult to compare alcohol prices when you were too drunk to remember what you were even drinking).

It was about three quarters past the hour of too-late-for-anything-else-to-be-open-except-seedy-corner-stores-but-only-just, when Jim experienced a sensation he had never actually felt before; the urge to – just for a moment – stop drinking. That made his belly uncomfortable in ways which could not be put down to the fact that this was possibly the hardest bar stool he had ever sat on, or the fact that his abnormal organs rubbed awkwardly in a body they could never really fit in, so Jim contextualised this feeling in his ever-bursting, *still* bursting, head with the excuse that he probably, on some level, needed a cigarette. He should go buy some.

He disentangled himself from the somewhat male Andronian on his left, and the completely miscellaneously gendered orion on his right and lurched, ripping his and their respective hands from his and their respective erogenous zones to pass their bubble of confusion, for the door.

Jim got on with his life a few months after that.

Frank moved in and hated him more intensely or unfoundedly than anyone had ever hated Jim before, but that was ok, Jim didn't care anyway so long as he interfered as little as possible in his life.

And Frank seemed to be happy with that, until one day when Jim came home - his mother absent to another mission way out in space somewhere - and there were a pair of fancy dudes insuites standing in the livingroom wesring expressions of barely repressed disgust. His stepfather was trying to *sell* him.

Of course, some false advertising had been put forth to get rid of the damaged merchandise - they obviously thought he was fertile if they had even considered him. So Jim opened his big fat mouth and rectified the situation.

Later that night he tried to drive his dad's car off a cliff.

He couldn't wear short sleeved shirts or shorts anymore, the bruises would show.

He couldn't go out into public areas without a chaperone until he was 18 because that fact that he was unbonded was equivalent to having 'rape me' tatooed in his forehead.

He couldn't do sports in school because he was omega and 'straining their delicate systems' was seen as a social crime, but he started running for other reasons than fitness soon after that little revelation.

Of course he couldn't work either, it was an omega's place be be a provided-for homemaker, no such liberating nonsense as to have them work as labourers was to be tolerated.

No good for working, no good for breeding, no good for anything, Frank always said.

Jim had long ago stopped listening to him.

Instead he got motivated. He flung himself into his school work (oblivious to the 'it's not your place's that passed his ears on a daily basis), got a part time job in a store where no one cared much about who was working as long as they were on time for their shifts and generally stayed away from home as much as possible, taking out a membership in a 24 hour gym to get strong and avoid home.

In the end he got into starfleet academy - as had been his goal - and planned to show society who was boss when everything he had worked for died a horrible, agonising death inside his own mind.

The evening outside of the bar seemed to sit in a competely other demension from it.

Cool, serene, blessedly quiet.

Everything the bar was not. But he didn't have the drunken attention span to draw proper comparisons.

He found himself bracing an arm and the majority of his torso up against the door, thrust back from it experimentally and found this did not satisfactorily erect him (the immature part of Jim's brain - ie all of it - giggles at this until he was giggling out loud). He tried again, pushed too hard and discovered he was now leaning against the other side o the doorframe And staring at a moving speck of person on the edge of his rather shortened vision. Then, with a third, strangely twisting, shoulder shove, he projected himself, stumbling like a newborn calf, into the street and the night.

Jim took a moment to survey the horizon of closed and shuttered stores before his eyes alighted on a chain convenience store he vaguely remembered - and could even more vaguely see at this very moment, due to the fact that his jaeger-ruined eyes couldn't hardly focus on his own hands a few inches from his face at this very moment in time. In fact, if he had seen such an aparitious store whilst sober (ha!) he may have thought it a mirage. Today, Jim took a leap of faith - quite literally - in the direction of his self-promised cigarettes.

The strobing behind his eyes continued on rmegardless of its unwantedness, seeming to become more intense, hard and bursting, as if whatever vein was causing it was trying to escape altogether.

*Good*, he thought.

But it wasn't all that good, because - rather than escaping - it throbbed harder and harder, pain rushing and holding, rushing and holding in his temples until his drunken shoes made him stumle with the pain.

He righted himself (but only just) continued walking - he had forgotten where - and discovered a couple of steps in that such feats were currently beyond him.

He stumbled, palpable turmoil flashed behind his eyes over and over and over. Building and building and beating like his head was going to burst and his feet let go of the ground and his head rose to meet it and iron rods of hot, silky steel stopped the chance encounter of forehead to asphalt. And - all at once - everything stopped.


End file.
